Remember when Trump was bragging to the skies that he had saved all those jobs at Carrier’s Indiana plant? Well Carrier is planning to lay off 300 of those workers just before Christmas. Carrier is owned by United Technologies one of the richest companies in the world and the recipient of billions annually in government contracts. Want to save those jobs? Tell Trump to inform United Technologies that the government won’t accept any contract bids from them if those jobs disappear.
It’s called leverage. In this case the government has it all. If United Technologies can give its retiring CEO a $172 million golden parachute it can afford to keep its workers working. Let’s see if tough guy Trump has the balls to confront United Technologies and keep his campaign promises or if he folds to the donation money that got him in office.
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Donald Trump is such a slime he just can’t keep from throwing an ad for something he wants into every conversation. This time it was in his sympathy note to Theresa May over the latest terrorist attack in London. He just couldn’t avoid saying something about his plea to the US Supreme Court for his travel ban. But he has no idea who the latest terrorists are and those in Manchester were native-born Brits so where is the backup for his ridiculous travel ban?
The ban itself doesn’t even mention Saudi Arabia the greatest exporter of terrorism in the modern world. Trump and the Saudi’s love to name Iran as the big exporter of terrorism and the Iranians are definitely often bad players but no one comes close to the Saudis and their Wahhabi cult. Saudi’s version of Islam is the progenitor of almost all the terrorism that takes place across the globe. Its Sunni bastardization of the Muslim faith is what drives ISIS, al Qaeda and most other Muslim terrorism.
With only one or two exceptions all the terrorism that has transpired here has been accomplished by native born Americans. What would a travel ban do to stop that? What such a ban will really accomplished is to keep skilled labor from reaching corporations that sorely need it to conduct their business here. We are educating foreigners and then sending them back to their own countries to compete with us instead of employing them here to benefit our economy. Of course Trump is too slow witted to see this and seemingly unable to read any arguments for this to change.
Going forward England will do what it has to do, what it has always done to make its island safe for its citizens while Trump will continue to erode our position in the civilized world. Many pundits have advanced the theory that Trump continues to create chaos in order to mask his intentions to advance certain of his plans for the dissolution of government. Really? Does this mean he actually has plans for our government? If that’s true he is certainly masking them well; so well that they are impossible to discern.
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Alex Castellanos one of my least favorite pundits finally came up with something that is logically correct and not stained by GOP Party loyalty. Speaking on This Week, he pointed out that there is no Republican Party or Republican leader and neither is there a Democratic Party or a Democratic leader. He says further that Trump is such a polarizing leader that he cannot reach across the middle to create some kind of accord. This leaves a huge opening for some young charismatic leader to step forward and make the deal that would make America great again. This is important because although America didn’t have to be made great again when Trump was running, it sure as hell is going to when he is through screwing things up.
Trump had a chance to do something positive this week in Sicily with the Paris Accords. Despite his campaign rhetoric done something positive. But he’s too stone headed, too aware of how he looks to the dim-witted 35% that rabidly follow him into one stupid position after another, so he lost a prime opportunity to be the great communicator on climate change.
Trump has become the primary expert on one thing; relinquishing world leadership. Governors and mayors in this country, as well as the international leaders in France and Germany, who simply refuse to go along with Trump’s nonsensical policies on climate change are taking over that leadership. We already see Jerry Brown, Governor of California, a state with the sixth largest economy in the world, saying that they will go it alone, without the national government. The Mayor of Pittsburgh and politicians in New York and fifteen other states that have sworn to uphold their responsibility to protect their citizens from a President who has gone mad, are joining Brown.
People keep asking what Trump really believes about climate change. He told us in a Hugh Hewitt interview on 9/21/15 when he said he believes in weather that changes but man made climate change is a hoax. He further said, he thinks our efforts to harness the climate will cost jobs. This despite every other informed source pointing out that more jobs are created in renewable clean technology than in dirty fossil fuels by over ten to one. Yet liars like Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator, go on the tube and falsely stating the Paris Accords represented a two and a half trillion-dollar reduction in our GDP over the next ten years and that it impacted over four hundred thousand jobs. The first part of the statement is an outright lie and the second is an evasion, because he never says how those jobs are impacted. Then he goes on to say that there have been over 50,000 jobs created in the coal industry in the last quarter when there have actually been over 10,000 jobs lost. He goes on to state that 7,000 coal-mining jobs have been created in May alone. Where? On what planet? You can tell Pruitt is lying because his lips are moving. He also says that the Obama administration claimed that we couldn’t add jobs while saving the environment when the Obama administration said exactly the opposite, that we would create more jobs in clean energy than we could ever create in fossil fuels because those infrastructures were worn out and failing. This is a guy who wouldn’t know the truth if it was shoved down his throat.
Then Castellanos on the same show displays his oiliness by coming out with the statement that Trump has not given up any leadership prerogatives by pulling us out of the Paris Accords, that the Accords themselves were a useless scam that guaranteed nothing. Well if it was a scam then Trump should have been nothing but comfortable being part of it but what it really is, is a statement of universal agreement that we should be doing something about climate change and what it accomplished was to get China and India the two largest polluters to the table and into an agreement to cut back on pollution.
As for Castellanos’ point that we are not giving up any leadership by Trump’s clownish actions, that is pure fantasy! By pulling out of the TPP and not trying to redo it, Trump ceded leadership in Asian trade to China. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. In pulling out of the Paris Accords he has ceded climate leadership to France and Germany but also opened the door to China who has been trying to get its foot in the European scene for decades. The fact is that Trump doesn’t understand any of this. He has neither the mental capacity to understand it nor the ability to learn what he needs to know to be involved in it and the entire nation is suffering for his monumental ignorance.
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With all noise being made in Washington it may seem to some that the following column is small change but if you live in or visit Manhattan, which is still the center of the world, this is a real, definitely man made, problem that can easily be solved if our city fathers exhibit the least amount of courage and stand up to the various factions involved for the good of the city in general.
The city recently announced that they are changing the traffic rules regarding parades that already unnecessarily clog our streets and cause monumental traffic jams in a city that is already one of the most clogged in the world. They will no longer stop the parades at major intersections to allow crosstown traffic to negotiate its way to its destination. Now all traffic must go around the parade, wending its way to crosstown streets above or below the parade route.
The concept is to provide a safer route, as it denies any terrorist driven truck from accessing he parade from a crosstown street. But in this case the sure is worse than the disease.
This is the epitome of brain dead. It will bring the city to a complete standstill every time we are cursed by the presence of a parade. But the solution is a simple one. This blog has long advocated for moving all parades to the road inside Central Park. It is a stretch that runs 50 blocks, actually more than that because it is not straight and it is a distance that is actually longer than many parade routes. It would be away from vehicular traffic, it would provide a beautiful setting and it would not shut down the city the way current parades do. It would also provide better safety than the current solution.
Of course the Central Park Conservancy will have a coronary; all those people tramping around on their lawns! But that’s what lawns are for. Yes there will be garbage but there is garbage now. Of course there will be a huge noise made from all the ethnic groups that hold parades now. We will hear volumes about how the city is interfering with them honoring their heritage because 5th Avenue is mire prestigious than the park. As a member of one of those groups I can attest to the position that if our grandparents had felt so strongly about their heritage they would not have left wherever they came from and none of us would be living in Manhattan now. So get real. These are commercial productions on which certain people or organizations make a lot of money and they should not be allowed to interfere with the life of the city the way they currently do.
There are two parades that currently do not fall under the ethnic group category; Memorial Day and Thanksgiving. The Memorial Day parade, probably the one to which the city in general should give the most honor, currently goes down Riverside Drive and doesn’t seem to affect traffic in the city very much. The Thanksgiving Day parade is really a giant advertising ploy by Macy’s. It has become a national event. Its balloons have also become something of a safety hazard, one that is often affected by the weather. Its current route, from 77th Street to 34th Street is actually
shorter than the Central Park route would be so it seems that such a move would make the parade safer and longer. Because buildings and walls are not close to the park route, it would allow for many more people to view the parade without need of temporary bleachers, a big financial saving for the city.
All in all, moving the parades into the park is a win/win for the city and the millions of residents who have no investment in the parades. It seems like the only intelligent move.
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The latest pundit dance in Washington is to propose that Trump acts like a gangster because he doesn’t understand the nuances of Washington or the Presidency. They are trying to sell the myth that this multi -millionaire businessman is somehow an innocent in paradise. First of all Trump isn’t innocent – of anything. He is the guiltiest ascendant to the Presidency ever.
Most important; everything Trump has done, especially with regard to the Comey business or the blundering revelations of classified material to the Russians was done because of his monumental ego and his reinforced belief that the Presidency of this democracy is equivalent of a dictatorship in a Third World nation. Yes, Trump ruled a small family business in a big real estate world and yes, that gave him the impression that he was omnipotent, especially because he is the kind of man who is surrounded by “yes men.” But to equate this situation with him being in any way innocent or unknowing of what he was doing when he approached Comey and other heads of intelligence services is just to be an apologist for a selfish egomaniac who just wants his way and doesn’t care what moral or legal lines he has to trample on to get it. This is a man who wound his way through his business career, cheating, conning or bribing anyone who stood in his way. It’ just the way this crook does business. He admits it! It isn’t that he didn’t understand that he was doing something wrong. It’s that he didn’t care; that he doesn’t recognize any other way to operate. He doesn’t care that we have three parts to our government. He doesn’t care that we have rules of conduct; established over many years in order to assure the smooth function of government. He is a spoiled brat who has always gotten his way and thinks that he can continue to push people around to achieve the same in the White House. It isn’t that he is ignorant of the position of the Director of the FBI or the need to keep classified material secret; it’s that he just doesn’t care when it runs against his own personal wishes. He isn’t a moron but he is definitely a selfish twit who’s proving to be a disastrous anchor around the neck of the United States.